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Anyone tried Apple MacOS Sierra with SL Viewer yet?


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No,it is not viewer specific, but GPU specific. 

As far as I know the Radeon GPUs are not affected like the NVIDIA ones. – Which is why your iMac is good.

The crash is more pronounced on macOS 10.12 than on 10.11. Per my findings the crash on 10.11 occurs in the culling code; the code that caclulates what part of the scene is visible and shall be rendered. It manifest itself in scenes with medium to high content of mesh items when shadows are turned on.

On 10.12 in addition the code that calculates ambient occlusion will crash the viewer, and this can be provoked by only turning ambient occlusion on. 

There is a jira for the crash, but as far as I know nothing have been done but acknowledge the fact.

More important Apple Engineering has been able to repro the crash on the SecondLife viewer with the OpenGL 2.1 profile that the Mac version of all viewers use. To fix it, the Mac version must use a OpenGL 3.2 profile for the renderer as a minimum (and be made Metal aware). 

We have a development version of Kokua for OpenSim where the ambient occlusion issue is partly squashed. You can still log on to SecondLife with this version of the viewer. 

 

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:


Gavin Hird wrote:

 

In areas of moderate to high mesh content the GPU will spontaneously reset and the viewer will crash when shadows are turned on. This sould only happen if you have a NVIDIA GPU in your Mac. This also happens on 10.11 and is a known bug reported to LL a year ago. They have to fix the rendering code.

Is this official viewer specific?

My Macbook has an nVidea card and I actually switched to Firestorm earlier in 2016 because the official viewer kept crashing and I had no idea why. Its been pretty stable on Firestorm... But my MacBook is still on 10.11

My iMac has a Radeon card, and is on Sierra, and has been stable in Firestorm.

 

Oh, Firestorm has this crash too, see https://jira.phoenixviewer.com/browse/FIRE-16821

If you are using the Nvidia web drivers though, you won't crash.  The crash only happens if the system is using the Apple Nvidia drivers.

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Whirly Fizzle wrote:


If you are using the Nvidia web drivers though, you won't crash.  The crash only happens if the system is using the Apple Nvidia drivers.

You can use the NVIDIA drivers, but they are both a bit hard to find, and tied to a specific macOS build so they break at just about every update. They are only meant for the Mac Pro, but they happen to work on other machines too. 

Here is a link to a site that maintains links to the drivers. Make sure you download the one for the macOS build number (can be easiest found from the System Report function linked to "About This Mac" on the Apple menu. 

This is, however, only a stopgap, and no excuse for LL not to fix the viewer code (that 25% of their contet developers relies on in one for or another.)

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Thanks for how much effort you're putting into this Gavin. It's much appreciated.

Is the Open Sim viewer you linked to the one at the top of the page, where it says Looking for the latest version? I've been trying that one out. Will try the driver from your other link as soon as I feel up to it. Thanks for the links.

The rest of this is for anyone who might find it helpful and in case someone from SL peeks in. Do they not realise how serious this can be? Or is it just not as sexy as Sansar and increasing LI?

Cool Viewer is generally the most likely to be stable for me at present, or at least with what I was attempting to do tonight. It still crashes ridiculously often and sometimes it can be a game of trying out a few viewers to see which one will play ball with the particular circumstances. Not which one will work best but which one will let me be in that part of SL at all.

I found instructions to make a wee app to sit on my desktop to clear my GPU cache before logging in. It helps, but using it hasn't yet become habitualised as part of logging in to SL. So if I've been doing something graphically intense and forget to clear the cache before starting up SL, the GPU (I guess) crashes and forces a reboot. As in the computer restarts itself. As in programmes shut down without saving. That's an impossible situation for working with GIMP and Blender to create content. Even with the whole cache-clearing routine, going between GIMP and SL or Blender and SL to see how something looks inworld is too much for it.

If I can't get a driver to work, I don't know what I'm going to do.

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It is one of the dmg files at the top. (with and without RLV support).

It is hard to say eactly why there is no priority of fixing the Mac version of the viewer, as in many ways the code it is made up of have rotted on root void of all the changes Apple have gone through since leaving the GCC compiler behind 6 major macOS versions back.

Most of this time I have been an observer, rather than an active contributor to a Mac version of the viewer, but my major observation is there is an inbred disdain of anything Apple both in Linden Lab, which also extends to the much larger section of the user base and developers. 

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Thanks Gavin. The open sim Kokua test viewer was mostly stable this morning. A couple of glitches but no crashes, even in two mesh heavy builds that usually take me down. :matte-motes-smile:

I really hope people are slow to increase their LI usage. More polys on sims will just make things harder for those of us who bought our Macs at the wrong time.

Going to enjoy the small relief for now and worry about how compromised visuals will affect creating later. Thanks again, you're a star.

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There are now SecondLife version builds of the Kokua viewer at Sourceforge that have the same code changes as the OpenSim version. This version should have the same functionality as the latest Linden release version. (most recent uploads)

These versions should work better on macOS 10.11 and 10.12. As stated before they will crash the GPU in some scenes so ymmw. 

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We have another round of builds for the Kokua viewer that in our own testing lowers GPU reset rates from "will crash within 5 minutes" to "no crash in 2 1/2 hours" in the same test scene. 

Obviously we don't have a large selection of Apple hardware to test on so YMMW, but we encourage you to test the new builds.

For these builds we also find that if you have 512 Mb or less graphics memory in your machine you will get a more stable system by setting the texture memory slider to 384 Mb in Graphcis Advanced preferences (Advanced - Hardware for OpenSim).

 

You get the SecondLife version and the OpenSim version from SourceForge. 

NOTE, the GPU will still be reset under certain conditions, but this cannot be fixed unless the renderer is rewritten to support OpenGL 3.2. 

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  • 4 weeks later...
  • 2 weeks later...

Adding this in to the database....

I have just discovered a wee icon at the top of my computer screen (it looks sort of like a stylised eye, or maybe not but I can't think of a better way to describe it). Clicking on it gives me the option to use either NVIDIA web driver or OS X native graphics driver. The tick is next to NVIDIA web driver, so it seems I did something which somehow switched that back and that might be why things are working so much better for me. Don't dare change it lest I bork something.

At some point in my earlier search for a solution, I apparently managed to install the NVIDIA Driver Manager (it appeared in my System Preferences). That is my best and only guess as to what the wee icon is about.

Don't really understand all of this (I like using Macs because generally they just work and don't require all of this mucking about and it wouldn't if it weren't for blasted SL grump), so I will just leave this here as something for others to try if they are stuck to. Good luck everyone.

Will sign up to test Kokua in the New Year, Gavin.

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  • 4 weeks later...

I wish the SL viewer was more stable in OS Sierra 10.2, Ive been on SL for almost 10 years and all this time ive gone through 5 different Mac computers.

It wasn't until recently, that I upgraded to my latest, a late 2015 iMac and Ive noticed constitently crashes, so frequently that I can barely do anything at times, crowded places are almost a no go and if I do make it, I have to be on pretty low settings, I will still crash eventually. Even when Im at home with just me and maybe 1 or 2 more avatars I can't even turn on the high settings without crashing down the road too.

Its really a shame this hasn't been fixed somehow yet, its frustrating having to be crashing so frequently when other people rarely do.

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  • 1 month later...

I installed Sierra after avoiding it for ages, and it makes my Mac completely unusable in Second Life.  Having been stable and online for hours at a time in areas of high complexity on the previous version but one, I am now crashing after five minutes at home on a sky box, and after seconds in shops and clubs.

It seems to me that it is a very risky business, forcing your customers to use outdated OS software in order to be able to use your product.  Given that the income LL depends on is from the current users of Second Life and very many of them will be using Macs, it seems ridiculous that they hven't paid any attention to the problem yet.  I am posting here, merely to add my voice to the others in this thread asking them to fix it.

I turned my graphics slider down, but apart from making some things look very odd, it doesn't seem to help.  Kokua viewer crashed after about five minutes in an empty club.

I am now rolling back to my previous OS viewer, but it makes Pixelmator inaccessible to me now.  However, I rely on Sl and OS for my work and thus have no choice.

 

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If you have an Nvidia Mac then frequent crashing is a known problem on Sierra & El Capitan.

The crashes are in the Apple Nvidia driver.

If you switch over to using the Nvidia web driver, the crashes will stop.

Bug reports:

LL Viewer: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-10302

Firestorm Viewer: https://jira.phoenixviewer.com/browse/FIRE-16821

I suspect the fix will need to come from Apple as the Nvidia web driver doesn't suffer from the crashes.

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  • 1 month later...
On 2/15/2017 at 2:48 PM, Whirly Fizzle said:

If you have an Nvidia Mac then frequent crashing is a known problem on Sierra & El Capitan.

The crashes are in the Apple Nvidia driver.

No, they do not. Stop spreading misinformation Whirly!

The crashes occur in the Linden code beaches it is using OpenGL extensions not available not the OpenGL 2.1 profile all viewers (including Firestorm) use on macOS. So it tries to write to GPU memory illegally, causing a GPU MMU reset. 

 

The good thing is that in out testing of Kokua and KokuaOS, these are significantly more stable on macOS 10.12.4. The same is the case with the SecondLife official viewer. The other viewers tested still crash or have strange mesh artifacting. 

I have sent an large number of stack traces to Apple the last year, and it seems they have been able to eliminate some of the conditions leading up to the crash, but in busy scenes the viewers will crash as before. 

Edited by Gavin Hird
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1 hour ago, Gavin Hird said:

No, they do not. Stop spreading misinformation Whirly!

The crashes occur in the Linden code beaches it is using OpenGL extensions not available not the OpenGL 2.1 profile all viewers (including Firestorm) use on macOS. So it tries to write to GPU memory illegally, causing a GPU MMU reset. 

 

 

If the Apple Nvidia driver is not at fault, why does switching to the Nvidia web driver fix  the crashes then?

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4 hours ago, Gavin Hird said:

No, they do not. Stop spreading misinformation Whirly!

The crashes occur in the Linden code beaches it is using OpenGL extensions not available not the OpenGL 2.1 profile all viewers (including Firestorm) use on macOS. So it tries to write to GPU memory illegally, causing a GPU MMU reset. 

Sigh. As has already been pointed out to you several times over, it is in fact a driver issue. Please go back and read https://lists.secondlife.com/pipermail/opensource-dev/2017-February/010411.html instead of just being pissed off that someone is "flaming" you when you're wrong. The mac viewer never calls GL_ARB_occlusion_query2. Simple as that.

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On 4/2/2017 at 1:46 PM, Cinder Roxley said:

Sigh. As has already been pointed out to you several times over, it is in fact a driver issue. Please go back and read https://lists.secondlife.com/pipermail/opensource-dev/2017-February/010411.html instead of just being pissed off that someone is "flaming" you when you're wrong. The mac viewer never calls GL_ARB_occlusion_query2. Simple as that.

As opposed to you Cinder, I have an open acknowledged bug report with Apple Software Engineering on the subject and it is NOT the driver, it is the Linden code that is not being updated for deprecated functionality. 

 

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On 4/2/2017 at 11:04 AM, Whirly Fizzle said:

If the Apple Nvidia driver is not at fault, why does switching to the Nvidia web driver fix  the crashes then?

The NVIDIA driver does not support Metal, which is the reason why users will see a significant reduction in system frame rates over using the Apple driver on macOS 10.11 and 10.12.

More importantly, the NVIDIA driver does not impose the restrictions of the Apple NSOpenGLProfileVersionLegacy where before Metal it was possible to call the OpenGL functions supported by the hardware directly, whereas after Metal in macOS 10.11 you can't do that any more with the Apple driver. This is why the code started to fail in 10.11.  

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9 hours ago, Gavin Hird said:

As opposed to you Cinder, I have an open acknowledged bug report with Apple Software Engineering on the subject and it is NOT the driver, it is the Linden code that is not being updated for deprecated functionality. 

 

I don't have an "open acknowledged" radar because when I reported the crash, they closed it as a duplicate of a driver bug when they broke everything in Mavericks. Hurr durr.

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24 minutes ago, Cinder Roxley said:

I don't have an "open acknowledged" radar because when I reported the crash, they closed it as a duplicate of a driver bug when they broke everything in Mavericks. Hurr durr.

Mavericks is 10.9 and there was no Metal till 10.11. 10.11 is when the crashes started, and this is when the NSOpenGLProfileVersionLegacystarted to be enforced strict. So what you reported for Mavericks is pretty much irrelevant. ;-)

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4 hours ago, Gavin Hird said:

Mavericks is 10.9 and there was no Metal till 10.11. 10.11 is when the crashes started, and this is when the NSOpenGLProfileVersionLegacystarted to be enforced strict. So what you reported for Mavericks is pretty much irrelevant. ;-)

and a change in the driver is what caused the crashes so what you reported to Apple is pretty much irrelevant much like all your constant moaning. ;-)

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